When comparing RethinkDB vs ArangoDB, the Slant community recommends RethinkDB for most people. In the question“What are the best databases to use for Node.js applications?”RethinkDB is ranked 2nd while ArangoDB is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose RethinkDB is:

Only takes about 30 seconds to install. They also have a docker file for running it on AWS, Google Cloud or your own.

Pros

Pro

Easy install

Only takes about 30 seconds to install. They also have a docker file for running it on AWS, Google Cloud or your own.

Pro

Horizontal scalability

RethinkDB is scalable horizontally. It has support for sharding, parallel queries and MVCC concurrency.

Pro

Changefeeds (change listeners)

You can listen to changes and trigger code based on these changes.

Pro

Powerful query language

RethinkDB's ReQL is a very powerful functional query language. The functional aspects of ReQL and the straightforward implementation of the Node driver for Rethinkdb make it a natural fit for Javascript developers. You no longer have to type some obscure syntax in quotes (aka SQL), your queries are just "natural" Javascript functions in the same way you would use lodash to handle your collections.

Pro

Ease of cluster setup

You can directly tell it to shard/replicate and how many shards/replicas depending on the amount of nodes. Each node doesn't need anything except one other node's ip/port in the cluster to join and maybe the auth.

Pro

CLI and web administration tools

RethinkDB has administration tools in both CLI and GUI (web app). You can view whats going on right away by going to localhost:8080. The data explorer allows you to run queries on the db.

Pro

Auto master promotion

Unlike a lot of other databases where if the master is down the system is down, this one if the master is down someone else is made master so much more peer to peer.

Pro

Easy cluster setup

Pro

Supports joins

Unlike many NoSQL databases, ArangoDB does support joins in AQL queries.

Pro

Transaction save

You can use ACID Transactions for short and small data retrieval and/or modification operations in ArangoDB.

Pro

JavaScript-API

You can extend ArangoDB using JavaScript that runs directly on the Server (Google V8). You can build data-centric microservices that aggregate, validate, transform or enrich data (It's up to you, plain JavaScript) and provide those via a custom API route.

Pro

Document and graph-orientend

You can model your data as documents or as a graph - no data model lock-in. You can even combine both models and use them in a single AQL query.

Pro

Powerful Java Driver (Sync & Async)

ArangoDB has a very good Java Driver for synchronous and asynchronous. In addition the team there is working on a Spring Data integration.

Cons

Con

Cannot run queries from its CLI

Con

No user accounts

This is just the database, you need to setup your own auth and user accounts (such as using Auth0).